Sunday, November 11, 2012

This is the second part of a two-part
series summarising my notes and thoughts from a recent ANZAMEMS postgraduate workshop on interdisciplinary research. This part starts with some examples of
areas/topics of study that cannot be approached without crossing disciplines
(in terms of bodies of knowledge and/or specialist skillsets) and then lays out a
practical six-stage heuristic for approaching interdisciplinary research. The
first part of this series described the last two stages of this heuristic: Determining the parameters of your research project (disciplinary, temporal, linguistic etc.) and determining the skillsets you need to do the research
(and where you can tap into these if you don’t have or plan to acquire them
yourself).

So, day two of the workshop opened with a
session by Stephen Clucas of Birkbeck, University of London, who talked about
his research on John Dee’s MathematicallPraeface as a way to explore the question of ‘whose disciplines are we
between?’ He started by asking whether, when we identify a domain to study in
the past (e.g. the history of science, in his case), we are sure we’re equipped
to recognise it in order to study it. As he pointed out, disciplines and
divisions of knowledge that we now consider to be entirely demarcated and
separate were often completely intermingled in medieval and early modern
contexts. For example, early modern writers used a mixture of theology, medical
knowledge and natural philosophy to explain the ‘soul’, while religious beliefs
and outlooks were constitutive of the of the natural philosophy of people like
Dee. Even when working with medieval or early modern disciplines that seem to
map quite neatly to modern disciplinary equivalents, one still needs to
understand the different ends and objects of that discipline in the past. (One
example of this that has applied in my own work is the need to understand the
very different ends and objects of judicial punishment in the medieval past,
even if it is being administered within a legal framework of common law that is
broadly similar to the modern system.)

After the scene was set with Dr Clucas' paper,
Peter Anstey of Otago University presented a framework and practical guidelines for
approaching this sort of research. The notes I took were weighted towards my
own interests as a historian but I think this framework would be applicable
across many disciplines. As I’m in the process of writing my PhD proposal at
the moment, I also found it quite valuable for structuring my thinking as I
work through the questions of scope, theoretical/ explanatory frameworks,
sources and the practicalities of doing my research etc.

A six-stage heuristic for interdisciplinary
research

1. Frame the research problem/issue

This needs to be very succinct and as clear
as possible. A good way to start can be to set up a hypothesis and then go
about identifying the evidence needed to prove or disprove it. (This is quite
common for historical research.) At this point, it is important to be clear
about what question(s) you’re asking but be aware that your hypothesis/question
will most likely change as you start to examine the evidence and the research
progresses.

2. Determine your philosophy of history

This element generated quite a lot of
discussion amongst the attendees. Some of us are novice researchers (e.g. first
year doctoral students) while others were more experienced ‘early career’
researchers who already had their PhDs and were working on post-doc projects,
books etc. At first, the expectation of having a ‘philosophy of history’ kind
of spooked me a bit, but it was reassuring to have Peter point out that as new
researchers, we are forging our personal philosophies as we go along and they
are probably quite immature and fragmented at this point, which is perfectly
okay. ‘Philosophy of history’ turns out to be a pretty broad concept in this
context, and could include things like Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial
approaches, progressive history (seeing history as linear progress/advance over
time), microhistory, and narrative history.

This question of philosophy of history
interacts with the next element -

3. Identify your historiographical
framework

This stage is aimed at understanding how
your problem/issue is generally understood and taught, in terms of the major
explanatory frameworks. Once you know what these are, you can then determine
(in part, based on your own philosophy) whether you are working with or against
them. Peter pointed out that for PhD students, this stage is most likely to
involve simply articulating what the historiographical framework is, rather
than coming up with new paradigms.

4. Settle on the genre of the project

For example, are you creating a PhD thesis?
An article? An edited text or translation? This will determine things like the
length of the project/finished product, the audience, authorial voice etc. This
aspect kind of seems like common sense to me, but I have heard stories of PhD
candidates turning up for the final defence and being told they need to cut
30,000 words from their thesis, completely alter the writing style to suit
their committee, put the whole document into a new format/citation style etc.
So I guess the key message here is to be clear up front, before you even start
the work, what it is that you need to have produced at the end of it. (For PhD
students, this would include things like studying your university’s regulations
very closely to see exactly what is required of you, down to such minutiae
as document margins and line spacing. Also, make sure you are clear on the
citation style you need to use and use it from the start. It is way easier and
less stressful to set that stuff up in your documents at the very beginning of
the process than to have to change it at the end.)

Stages five and six were to set the
project’s parameters (disciplinary, geographical, temporal, linguistic etc.)
and to determine the skills set you require (either skills you need to
have/acquire yourself, such as languages, or skills you need to tap into from
other disciplines/departments). These two stages are quite detailed and were
covered separately in part one of this series.